NV40 Launch Date Revealed?

Today there appeared new rumors in the web about the date of the upcoming announcement of the next generation graphics solution from NVIDIA aka NV40. We have already told you that NVIDIA will not announce their new graphics accelerator at the CeBIT computer show in Hanover, and today Extremetech web-site reported that NVIDIA would announce NV40 on April 13, 2004 in San Francisco. Our sources close to NVIDIA confirmed that NV40 will be announced “sometime in mid April”.

As you remember, the next generation of NVIDIA’s GPUs aka NV40 will be manufactured with 0.13micron technology and will contain 210 million transistors. The information circulating around the web says that the new NVIDIA solution will feature 16 rendering pipelines, and will support vertex shaders 3.0 and pixel shaders 3.0. NVIDIA expects NV40 to provide a significant performance boost compared to what their current solutions demonstrate.

Despite the tendency of the graphics solutions moving towards PCI Express, NV40 has no native support of this bus. NVIDIA expects PCI Express to be not so greatly demanded this year that is why NV40 based graphics cards will be able to support PCI Express but only via the additional bridge chip.

Competing solution from ATI also known as R420 will be also announced within the same timeframe and will support PCI Express natively. So far there is no objective info about the performance of the upcoming NV40 and R420 solutions.

NVIDIA’s officials refused to comment on this report.

Manufacturers of NVIDIA based graphics solutions told our rerpresentative at the CeBIT show, Anton Shilov, that they were going to start mass production of NV40 based cards in May.